1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to distributed or enterprise computing systems, and more particularly, to incident reporting in such systems.
2. Background Art
The data processing resources of business organizations are increasingly taking the form of a distributed computing environment in which data and processing are dispersed over a network comprising many interconnected, heterogeneous, geographically remote computers. Such a computing environment is commonly referred to as an enterprise computing environment, or simply an enterprise. Managers of the enterprise often employ software packages known as enterprise management systems to monitor, analyze, and manage the resources of the enterprise. Enterprise management systems may provide for the collection of measurements, or metrics, concerning the resources of individual systems.
In enterprise systems, various types of reports are commonly generated. For example, some reports may be generated at regular intervals, such as daily or weekly, to record activities and use of resources of the enterprise. Other reports may be generated when certain specified or defined incidents or events occur. Such reports, referred to as incident reports or incidents, may be generated when certain changes are requested or made or when error or fault or other types of conditions are detected that require the attention of an administrator or that, for other reasons, need to be recorded. These incident reports may be created, for example, by a service desk that services or administers the enterprise, or in a change management database (CMDB).
Incident Reports created in Service Desks or Change Management Databases (CMDB) lack critical pieces of information. This information that is lacking includes the resource dependencies identified as potential causes of the incident, and the status that the monitoring sources were reporting for those resources at the time the incident was created, the business services, applications or processes that depend upon those resources and SLA or OLA information associated with the resources, services, applications or processes. Without this information, the incident report is not able to accurately provide a snapshot of what was occurring in the enterprise when the incident report was created. This information is extremely valuable when attempting to resolve the incident (at a point in time that is after the incident was created and things in the enterprise may have changed) and in the ITIL Problem Management process when performing root cause analysis.